We got it wrong on Saddam weapons, says New York Times

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The New York Times has admitted that its coverage of Saddam Hussein's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction "was not as rigorous as it should have been" and that "we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged - or failed to emerge".

More than a year after Judith Miller and her Times colleagues suggested that Iraq was hiding such weapons, the paper said in an editors' note yesterday: "Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more scepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all."

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One of Miller's prime sources was Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile whose organisation was subsidised by the Pentagon and who "has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper", according to an email she sent to a colleague.

US-backed forces raided Chalabi's home in Iraq last week amid charges that members of his Iraqi National Congress may have given Iran sensitive information.

Dan Okrent, the paper's ombudsman, said on Tuesday he was looking into the WMD coverage and would publish his finding on Sunday. The paper's executive editor, Bill Keller, said he was busy on deadline and could not discuss the situation.

While many news organisations reported claims about banned weapons before the war, few did so as aggressively as the Times. The failure to find such weapons has produced growing calls by critics for the Times to own up to past errors.

Miller played an unusually active role while embedded last year with a US Army unit searching for illegal weapons, at one point objecting to a commander's order that the unit withdraw from the field and suggesting she would write about it unfavourably in the Times. The pullback order was later rescinded. The unit "is using Chalabi's intell and document network for its own WMD work", Miller wrote to her colleague.

Some of the Times's earlier reporting "depended in part on information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on 'regime change' in Iraq, people whose credibility has come under increasing public debate in recent weeks," the editors said.

. Three of the problematic stories were published in the Herald, which has a syndication agreement with The New York Times. In yesterday's advisory to syndication clients, the Times said of the stories:

In December 2001 Miller cited an Iraqi defector who claimed to have helped renovate secret facilities for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. While weapons might still be found, "in this case it looks as if we, along with the [Bush] Administration, were taken in. And until now we have not reported that to our readers".

A lead article in September 2002, co-authored by Miller, which claimed Saddam had intensified his quest for atomic bomb parts, "should have been presented more cautiously", and "misgivings" that surfaced days later "gave no inkling that we were revising our earlier view".

In April 2003 Miller reported that an Iraqi scientist who claimed to have worked on the weapons program "has told an American military team that Iraq destroyed chemical weapons and biological warfare equipment only days before the war began", and that the team had found "precursors" of banned toxic agents. But "the Times never followed up on the veracity of this source or the attempts to verify his claims".